CereScan of Denver, Colorado, claims to be able to diagnose mental disorders from scanned images of the brain. In 2008 it acquired the assets of a rival company, Brain Matters. A documentary on Public Broadcasting Service, a non-profit TV network in the United States, shows Brain Matters at work : a boy of 11 and his parents are seen waiting for the results of his MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scan to be explained by a social worker. “Are you nervous?” she asks. “No,” he replies. She shows the family the results: “This area … should be yellow and light brown, but for you, it’s red and white, and a little bit black.” Some colour patterns supposedly indicate depression, others a bipolar disorder or pathological anxiety.

CereScan meets a demand from a society that seems increasingly unable to tolerate deviance. The company claims one in eight Americans aged 18-54 — a total of 19 million people — suffer from an “anxiety disorder”. It believes the market has great potential and plans to open 20 centres across the US.

The criteria that define “normal” behaviour are not clearly established, but those for the diagnosis of deviance or disorders considered to be pathological, such as “attention deficit disorder”, are precisely set out in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the psychiatric practitioner’s bible in the US and a growing number of other countries. The DSM allows the identification of “pathological disorders” at ever-earlier ages. A million children have been diagnosed in the US with a “bipolar disorder” since the year 2000. The number of people aged 6-22 diagnosed as suffering from autism has also risen, from just under 16,000 in 1992 to 293,000 in 2008, or 338,000 including children aged 3-6 (a category that first appeared in the statistics in 2000).

Every day 850 adults and 250 children are added to the list of recipients of federal financial assistance for severe psychological disorders, and yet clinical trials among adults (...)

(4) Tardive dyskinesia is characterised by uncontrollable movements of the lower face.

(5) Lobotomy is a surgical procedure that destroys the connections between the prefrontal cortex and the rest of the brain, invented by Portuguese neurologist António Egas Moniz, who won a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for it in 1949. Once used to treat mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, it is now banned in most countries.

(6) Daniel J Carlat, Unhinged: the Trouble with Psychiatry — A Doctor’s Revelations about a Profession in Crisis, Free Press, New York, 2010.

(7) Interview with Daniel J Carlat on Fresh Air, WHYY-FM, National Public Radio, 13 July 2010.